The agency tasked with ensuring accountability of the US Postal Service is planning to consolidate four of its data centers into one, with the goal of saving operating costs and increasing data center capacity and energy efficiency of its infrastructure.

The news came from Compu Dynamics, contractor the USPS Office of Inspector General hired to do the job. The plan is to build the new data center in two phases over 10 months.

Compu Dynamics says it will design the new facility, build and commission it. The contractor will also oversee migration and installation of equipment at the new site, whose location was omitted from the announcement.

The data center will include modular power systems and high-density in-row cooling. The cooling system will be supplemented by an economizer. The contractor is designing the infrastructure to N+1 redundancy.

Compu Dynamics president Stephen Altizer pledged in a statement to build the data center for reliability and redundancy and "intelligent" maintainability. "We're very pleased to be awarded this project and look forward to completing the entire relocation/consolidation process with minimal disruption to the USPS OIG's ongoing operations."

All US federal agencies are under pressure to develop and implement plans to consolidate their data centers. Under its current plan, the White House is seeking to shut down more than 800 data centers by the end of 2015 to rein in IT infrastructure spending.

The government currently operates more than 2,000 data centers total, spending US$24bn on IT infrastructure every year.